Thanks for your response, hamilcarr; I appreciate it. Your mentioning T.S. Eliot reminds me of when I taught his "Wasteland" to my students. I like all of his poetry; I found his series - "The Hollow Men" - to be equally impressive. Did you ever see the film, Apocalypse Now? In it, the character of Kurtz reads a selection from "The Hollow Men." Very moving. T.S. Eliot certainly knew how to address the spiritual malaise of Western culture. Eliot was a member of that "blasted" generation.
I also taught Kafka's The Metamorphosis. In your post, were you thinking of The Trial, or of The Castle?
I am in total agreement with your observation that Hesse was on the vanguard of postmodernism. In Steppenwolf, Hesse refers to Nietzsche, who is generally considered to be a precursor to postmodernism. When I was typing the post above, I was thinking about this fact. Because I wanted to "keep it simple," I omitted the following quote from Steppenwolf (pp. 57-8 in the "Picador" edition): "For there is not a single human being...not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles...but between thousands and thousands [...] Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lens of delusive formulas and artless simplifications - and most of all himself."
If I'm reading this decidedly difficult sentence correctly, Hesse is stating that the conception that a man has of himself is mediated - is refracted, and thus distorted - through the lens of himself; all people see everything (including themselves) through a lens which, in its very nature of being a lens, distorts their perception. And this lens is themselves.
Hesse continues: "For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grieviously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again." Furthermore, Hesse claims that if ever [as all genius must] "they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to the aid, and establishes schizomania and protects humanity from hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate individuals."
For Hesse, "every ego, far from being a unity is a maniflod world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities."
In my opinion, this sounds very much like postmodern theory. However, I have to admit to having a problem with the term, postmodernism, or rather, its etymology. This word is derived from combining the Latin prefix post - which means "after" - with the Latin word modus, which I believe means "now," or "the present moment." So, quite literally, the term means "that which is after now [or the present moment]." It's quite a handy phrase, but it's like a person saying - "I am asleep." Of course, a person could say this, but what does it mean? Perhaps, postmodernism has become a catch-all expression a tout faire.
As Umberto Eco claims, the word should be understood as referring to a viewpoint or mindset. After all, there have been people who claimed that Euripides can be thought of as "postmodern"